The Cast of ‘Amazing Grace’ Grapples With Slavery

One by one, they passed into the stone monument, a dark chamber meant to evoke a ship’s hold, and turned tear-streaked faces toward the shaft of sunlight.

For months — in some cases, for years — the actors had been working on roles as slaves, slaveholders and slave traders in a musical called “Amazing Grace.” Now they were standing in Lower Manhattan, at a site where thousands of African-Americans, who lived in New York through the decades when slavery was legal here, were buried and then lost to time.

They examined pictures of exhumed skeletons; pored over maps of shipping routes; and thought about their own ancestors and their own complex emotions over allowing themselves to be caged or shackled onstage.

As the cast gathered at the mouth of the memorial sculpture, Chuck Cooper, a Tony Award-winning actor dressed for church in the Sunday heat, closed his eyes and began to sing a spiritual, “I’ve Been in the Storm Too Long,” that he had learned while portraying a private school headmaster in another show. But now he was playing a slave — a manservant to the show’s white protagonist — and, as for many in the cast, that has been an emotional career move.

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Rachael Ferrera and Uyoata Udi at the African Burial Ground National Monument.CreditDanny Ghitis for The New York Times

“I’m a black man in America, and for me to play a slave has weight — it has karmic weight, and that is inescapable,” Mr. Cooper said. “It’s in me. It’s in my DNA. It’s in my cells. It’s not a matter of finding it — it’s a matter of uncovering it.”

“Amazing Grace,” which is in previews for a July 16 opening at the Nederlander Theater, is a sweeping historical musical, set in England, Africa and the Caribbean, about John Newton, a British slave trader born in the 18th century who, after briefly being enslaved himself in Africa, had a religious conversion, became an abolitionist and wrote the words for the hymn from which the show takes its name.

The producers are aggressively marketing to church groups and African-Americans — two groups who do not make up a large segment of current Broadway ticket-buyers — hoping that the musical’s story of redemption through faith and its connection to African-American history will be a draw. Plus, there is the appeal of the hymn itself — President Obama recently reminded the world of the song’s power by singing it at the funeral of a murdered pastor in Charleston, S.C.

The melody is woven through the body of the musical, and the full hymn is sung during the epilogue and reprised at the curtain call, at which point audiences often stand and join in.

The show, which cost $16 million to bring to the stage, is not the first to depict slavery on Broadway, but its treatment of the slave trade is both extensive and stark, and has posed a challenge for the creators, who have toughened their treatment of the subject throughout the musical’s long development, and for the cast, many of whom have struggled with playing uncomfortable roles.

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From left, Ms. Ferrera, Laiona Michelle, Josh Young and Chuck Cooper at the Bridge Street Church.CreditDanny Ghitis for The New York Times

At junctures in the writing process, consultants and critics had pressed the show to go deeper in exploring the brutality of slavery; as they did so, the cast and crew had to pause during rehearsals to share their feelings about what exactly they were doing onstage.

“The first time I saw cast members being pulled out of a cage, it was very intense,” said Harriett D. Foy, who plays an African princess who is herself a slave trader. “I could not stop crying.”

The show’s director, Gabriel Barre, said that the act of chaining people, even actors playing a role, had given everyone pause. “No matter how much you’ve been exposed to it, to touch a piece of chain, and to wrap it around somebody or to have it wrapped around you, is absolutely gripping,” he said. “So we dealt with it carefully, and talked about it with everybody.”

Newton, who is played on Broadway by Josh Young (a Tony nominee for “Jesus Christ Superstar”), has been a significant presence in two recent movies. And the depredations of slavery have been explored repeatedly in film — graphically, for example, in “12 Years a Slave,” which won the 2014 Academy Award for best picture — and, increasingly, Off Broadway, in such plays as “An Octoroon.”

But Mr. Barre said Broadway is different.

“Cinema allows somewhat of a safe distance from the events that are being depicted,” he said. “In the theater, we concentrate on honoring the ancestors of the people in our cast and our audience who went through this by portraying it truthfully, but at the same time understanding that it’s difficult to watch. No one has accused us of shying away from the brutality, which is important to us, but no one has said it’s impossible to watch. That’s the balance.”

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Harriett D. Foy, center, in the show.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Early in the development process, the show’s creator, a former Pennsylvania police officer and first-time musical writer named Christopher Smith, invited Natalye Paquin, an arts executive in Philadelphia, to a reading. Ms. Paquin loved the musical, but said that, at that time, it needed to be more cleareyed about Newton’s own history as a slave trader. She advised the team that Newton needed “to truly own the human tragedy and negative impact of his actions.”

“The early version may have been light on the dark side of Newton’s actions, and a bit romanticizing of the friendship that developed between Newton and a young slave,” Ms. Paquin, who is now chief executive of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania, recalled. “It was tough and bitter feedback, but I thought it was important.”

Mr. Smith was determined to get it right; he did extensive research on slavery, brought in an expert on Sherbro language and culture (the Sherbros are an ethnic group in Sierra Leone), and experts on African dance and music. At the start of rehearsals for the Chicago tryout run, Mr. Barre assigned each cast member to research an aspect of history portrayed in the show; in New York, Bret Shuford, an understudy and assistant dance captain who works around Manhattan as a tour guide when not performing, suggested the field trip to the African Burial Ground National Monument.

Marcus Gardley, who has written four plays dealing with slavery, saw the show twice in Chicago, and encouraged the creators to depict “the authenticity of how horrible it was.”

“When you talk to African-American audiences, that’s their grief — people don’t want it to be sugarcoated,” he said. “In this show, we actually see Africans being sold in Africa, which is very seldom portrayed — it was hard to watch, but I was happy to see that.”

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Erin Mackey and Mr. Udi viewing photos of the remains of slaves.CreditDanny Ghitis for The New York Times

Nonetheless, the critic Chris Jones, reviewing the musical for The Chicago Tribune, contended that “the institution of slavery just cannot play dramaturgical second fiddle,” and criticized the show for having too much of “a focus on the doings and feelings of the white people.”

So the creators went to work again, adding new details, in particular to Mr. Cooper’s character, Thomas, and giving him the show’s opening, as well as its closing, so that a slave now serves as a sort of narrator.

For some of the actors, the hardest issue was simply taking a role that, for many, involved choices they had hoped to avoid. “When I was in graduate school, we did a show called ‘A Month in the Country,’ and there was a maid role, and I remember thinking, ‘I am not playing any maids. I will not. I’m supposed to be the leading lady,’ ” said Laiona Michelle, a cast member. “And then I came out of school, and I naturally started falling into these roles that black women fall into, as maids and servants, and supporting and mothering, and it was rare that I would be the Juliet, rather than the nurse.”

In “Amazing Grace,” Ms. Michelle is making her Broadway debut as Nanna, a house slave, and says she is proud of the role. “As a child, this was a topic I hated discussing — I grew up in a Catholic school, where I was always the one black kid in the classroom, and whenever it was that history lesson on slavery, I felt like all eyes were on me,” she said. “It took a long time for me to embrace it wholly — there’s a part of me that wants to detach, and not remember it fully, but I’m called to, and I have to. It’s an honor to be in this piece, but I told myself, ‘Anytime I’m starting to feel too comfortable playing this role, something is wrong.’ ”

The cast members are now marketing the show to black churches, and arguing that the musical’s confrontation with history can help prompt discussion about racial relations, and violence, in the United States today. On a recent Sunday, the leading actors visited Bridge Street Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to perform songs from the show, concluding with a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

“In the end, it’s bigger than me deciding to take this role,” said Rachael Ferrera, who plays a slave named Yema. “What will this as a whole have to offer? What story are we telling? What is the greater purpose?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Bearing the Crushing Weight of History . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe